Your Right to Know

MOSCOW — Ecuador signaled yesterday that it might deliberate slowly on the asylum
application from Edward Snowden, raising the possibility that the fugitive former security
contractor could spend weeks in limbo as he plots his next steps inside a Moscow airport transit
area.

Statements from Ecuador’s foreign minister and embassy in Washington came as the Obama
administration sought to lower the Cold War atmospherics over Snowden with Russia, which said on
Tuesday that it would not extradite him in defiance of U.S. demands.

Snowden, 30, whose revelations of U.S. surveillance activities have raised a debate about the
government’s invasion of privacy, remained out of sight yesterday at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo
airport.